In the heat of this Melinda Tankard Reist debate I thought it might be a good time to post a link to this old piece that I love, “The rights of the born” from the Christian feminist writer, Anne Lamott:
EVERYTHING WAS going swimmingly on the panel. The subject was politics and faith, and I was on stage with two clergymen with progressive spiritual leanings, and a moderator who is liberal and Catholic. We were having a discussion with the audience of 1,300 people in Washington about many of the social justice topics on which we agree — the immorality of the federal budget, the wrongness of the president’s war in Iraq. Then an older man came to the mike and raised the issue of abortion, and everyone just lost his or her mind.
Or, at any rate, I did…..
….. But then I asked myself: Would I, should I, have given a calmer answer? Wouldn’t it have been more useful and harder to dismiss me if I had sounded more reasonable, less — what is the word — spewy?
Maybe I could have presented my position in a less strident, divisive manner. But the questioner’s use of the words “murder” and “babies” had put me on the defensive. Plus I am so confused about why we are still having to argue with patriarchal sentimentality about teeny weenie so-called babies — some microscopic, some no bigger than the sea monkeys we used to send away for — when real, live, already born women, many of them desperately poor, get such short shrift from the current administration.
Most women like me would much rather use our time and energy fighting to make the world safe and just and fair for the children we do have, and do love — and for the children of New Orleans and the children of Darfur. I am old and tired and menopausal and would mostly like to be left alone: I have had my abortions, and I have had a child.
But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women is a crucial part of that: It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society…
And all this reminds me that the Catholics for Choice have also written some of the most beautiful, most loving, most perceptive stuff I have ever read in support of women choosing abortion.
Thank you so much for sharing the Catholics for choice link.
In my experience as a Catholic, this site runs closer to the way I was taught and raised as a Catholic than many others I have come across. (And most Catholic men and women I know are pro-choice, pro-contrception and pro-same sex marriage rights.)
I think I’m going to go read some more from Anne Lamott, I like what she has to say in your excerpt very much.
Catholics for Choice! How fantastic. Just when you are ready to pigeonhole an entire religion’s followers for being all lock-step and intolerant, you learn a new fact that makes you sad you were so ready to dismiss them in the first place.
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